"Adulterated" coffee is flooding the market: Is it because Vietnamese people prefer coffee that is "strong, bitter, thick, and frothy"?

In recent years, the coffee market has been volatile, with counterfeit coffee rampant, genuine coffee losing its market share, and consumers not knowing how to distinguish between the two.

The alarming state of food safety and hygiene, coupled with a segment of businesses resorting to unscrupulous tactics to profit, disregarding the health and lives of consumers, has caused widespread public outrage. Counterfeit coffee not only harms consumers' health and finances but also causes confusion and a gradual loss of trust in Vietnamese products.

A market survey easily reveals that, alongside large, branded coffee shops, many affordable coffee services such as mobile coffee vendors and small roadside stalls have emerged due to their convenience and low prices. Coffee is pre-brewed in large containers kept cold in ice chests before being served to customers, with added sugar, milk, and froth. While these vendors advertise their coffee as pure, no one knows the actual ingredients or how it's blended.

To produce those fragrant and delicious cups of coffee that are widely available on the market for just a few thousand dong, counterfeit coffee producers mix in many additives and impurities such as corn, soybeans, palm grass, and burnt coffee husks. These ingredients create a rich, aromatic flavor after roasting, while also adding a bitter taste that misleads consumers into thinking it's real coffee.

Even more concerning, to create the aroma, many production facilities use coffee extract, mainly made from chemicals, containing many impurities and toxic heavy metals. These chemical flavorings are easily purchased from flavor stores, with their origin and safety questionable. The environment in which fake coffee is produced is often damp and unsanitary, with old, outdated tools such as hoes, shovels, and roasting and grinding equipment.

Roasting soybeans until they burn to resemble real coffee destroys their nutritional components and produces substances that are highly toxic to consumers. The proliferation of fake coffee also stems partly from consumer habits, as Vietnamese people still primarily judge the quality of coffee based on flavorings and additives.

Taking advantage of the Vietnamese consumers' preference for coffee with four characteristics – "strong, bitter, thick, and frothy" – producers often mix in impurities to meet consumer tastes and preferences.

Currently, many substandard coffee production facilities have been discovered and shut down; however, this is only a very small number compared to the hundreds or thousands of coffee processing and roasting facilities that the authorities have not yet been able to fully manage.